What it Means to "Ground" Your Energy

by Ruwan Meepagala Jun 30, 2014

“All occult practices are centered in the body. Not because it make spiritual ascendance quicker, it actually makes it slower, but you do it so that you can go far out in the mind and have a body so deeply rooted that it can always find it’s way back to reality.”

-Nicole Daedone

In OM, before any genital contact, we firmly massage her thighs. In the last two minutes of stroking we do slower, firmer, “downstrokes.” After the stroking, we cup her pussy with both palms and apply firm pressure to push the blood back into her body. All three of these actions are referred to as grounding.

To ground is to bring the energy “down” to a stable form. The term come from electric circuits having a terminal in the ground, giving excess charge a place to empty out. For literal electric circuits, grounding prevents excess charge from electrocuting bystanders. For the figurative electric circuit of sensation in your body, grounding allows you to hold sensation without “getting fried”--losing consciousness in some manner.

Grounding in this sense can seem abstract but we’ve all know the experience of “groundedness.” It’s the feeling of being settled, present, aware of the reality. We call someone a “grounded person” when they don’t easily get caught in delusions or mental overwhelm.

We also know the experience of lack of groundedness.

When a student falls asleep in a lecture it’s because his attention wasn’t grounded and went into your head so he literally become unconscious of reality. That’s why we fall asleep when we’re bored or something is above our heads -- our attention can’t keep up with the stimulus.

When the teacher calls him out and he has a visceral reaction that “puts him back in his body.” Your body is the material manifestation of yourself. To be conscious of third-dimensional reality is to be conscious of your body. A little trick I learned in Mastery from Nicole Daedone is that when you feel yourself falling asleep, feel your feet on flat on the floor. Just that shift in awareness to the real feeling of literal gravity will have you be more conscious.

Many spiritual paths discount the body and therefore the material world because of some judgement that the “spiritual world” is superior to our crude physical incarnation. Such body-denial practices lead to an inability to connect with other humans and function in this world of ours. There’s nothing “holy” about that.

This principle is apparent even outside of spiritual circles.

In improv, new actors often think they can get the most laughs by going as crazy as possible on stage, and end up creating scenes that no one understand. My improv teacher always says “you need to ground the scene before you introduce absurdities, otherwise it’s too ridiculous to be funny.” In that context he means you need to establish a relatable realities before you add stretches of the imagination. The audience laughter doesn’t depend on how absurd the dialogue is, as much as how it contrasts the grounded reality.

In other words, sensation increases in the space between the known and unknown. You can’t jump without ground to jump from.

So back to orgasm.

We ground before and after stroking in an OM because it tethers us to the real world. When partners don’t ground well beforehand, it becomes difficult to raise sensation very high; it’s like trying to jump up from Jello rather than solid ground. When partners don’t ground well after an intense OM, they can have trouble functioning; their eyes can literally be bloodshot or get headaches from too much energy rising upwards.

Producing sensation and cultivating orgasm is useless unless we bring it back into the real world with us. No matter what your beliefs are around the energetic world or experience in higher planes of consciousness, you have a body and that body lives in a seemingly solid reality.

In Reggie Watts’ TED talk he reminds that even if we’re in a Matrix, “the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one. It's believable, it's tactile. You can reach out -- things are solid. You can move objects from one area to another.You can feel your body. You can say, ‘I'd like to go over to this location,’ and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location at will. That's something you live inside of every day.”

Our ability to enjoy this simulation goes as far are our ability to ground our experiences into what we can feel in our bodies.